Film Reviews by Alphaville

After a brilliantly colourful and imaginative pre-title chase sequence on a tropical island, this immediately hits rock bottom in office buildings, where we’re supposed to find klutzy Christine Wiig and clownish loser Pedro Pascal interesting. Gal Gadot hardly gets a look in. For a painful hour of banal dialogue this is soapy melodrama that even East End writers would have binned.

The plot involves a crystal that makes wishes come true, which is a cheesy way of enabling the writers to resurrect a dead Chris Pine from the previous instalment in the franchise. Pascal gets transformed into a megalomaniac. Wiig gets transformed into a beautiful woman, which we know because (cliché alert) she gets big hair and stops wearing her glasses. Naturally they get superpowers and there are even a few Me Too virtue-signalling moments. Yes, it’s painful stuff.

The long-awaited face-off between them and Gadot is the usual overwrought cgi comic-book nonsense, and that’s not even the worst of it. Still to sit through is a melodramatic finale so tear-jerkingly awful it should come with a medical warning that you might split your sides laughing.

Frances McDormand is a poor “houseless” woman who lives in a van and travels around the American West. If this was a British film it would be a political diatribe against “the system”. Instead it’s a wonderful paean to life on the road, the joys of solitariness, the spirit of community among like-minded travellers and, not least, the beauty of the Western landscape.

It adopts a documentary-style approach, with some of the travellers she meets being real-life people rather than actors and with scant a plot apart from the changing of the seasons and the triumphs and disappointments of everyday living. But it’s so gentle and beautiful to watch that you soon get drawn into the life and the epic landscapes along with the travellers.

Worthy, documentary-style Mexican drug movie, with long-held shots and little score to heighten the drama. It’s all filmed from the POV of our heroine, who gets drawn in to drug smuggling. She’s the only real character in the film, which is a real problem as she’s not very interesting and is mostly just a passive pawn in proceedings. This makes it difficult to care about or even follow most of what’s going on around her.

There’s some nice camerawork here and there among the odd shoot-out, but there’s never any emotional involvement in what’s going on. It’s like watching the news. The film’s worthiness has even enabled it to garner some good reviews. The wildly OTT DVD blurb spouts nonsense about it being “explosive”, “mesmerising” and “leaving you gasping for air”. You’re more likely to be “gasping for the FF button”.

You know those historical documentaries with dramatised reconstructions that never seem real? This whole film is like a series of those reconstructions… plus a laughably sonorous voiceover to fill in the gaps. Little plot, cardboard characters, risible dialogue, phone-in acting, bland direction.

It’s billed as ‘a swashbuckling adventure’. If only. There’s a woke message here as real-life Victorian adventurer Sir James Brook boats through the Borneo jungle fighting slavery, but few will care. Apparently his story inspired Apocalypse Now. If only art-house director Michael Haussman had binge-watched Apocalypse Now to find inspiration for this turgid art-house drama.

A mother struggles to cope with her son. The result? Slice-of-life art-house dross, filmed in a (almost) square ratio to accommodate an over-emphasis on still close-ups of faces. Where’s the exit door? Critics who rated this film highly are like the courtiers who praised the naked emperor’s new clothes. Any film that opens with a long still shot of washing on a line deserves every brickbat thrown at it. But then this isn’t a film, it’s more a soul-destroying student project. As a warning to anyone who picks up a camera, it should be allowed to decompose quietly in a pretentious and obscure art gallery. Stay well clear.

In a future settlement on a distant planet all the women have been killed off by the local species (The Spackle), leaving the men to die out. But hang on a minute, there’s another settlement with women just through the woods! Don’t laugh. Also, the men (but not the women) can hear each other’s thoughts and see them as wavy lines called The Noise. Don’t laugh. Then Daisy Ridley arrives by spaceship and finds a motorbike that enables her to be chased by men on horseback. Okay, you can laugh at that one. She and another Young Adult (Tom Holland) must now go on a journey through the woods to Farbranch so that they can bicker and get to know each other. Don’t yawn.

All this is based on a children’s novel that one hopes worked better on the page because the film is a complete mess. More interesting is a very revealing Making Of on the DVD Extras. Doug Liman, normally a reliable director, had no working script, had no idea how to tackle the subject matter and seemed to make everything up as he went along. It shows.

A film based around Moliere’s ‘Le Misanthrope’ may appeal only to a niche audience outside France, but anyone who regards that work as one of the greatest plays ever written (including this reviewer) will find it a treat. Others will still be seduced by its gentle humour and Gallic charm, with director Philippe de Guey channelling the spirit of Eric Rohmer.

A famous actor visits a retired actor on the beautifully photographed Ile de Ré to persuade him to play Moliere’s title character Alceste. (The French title of the film translates as ‘Alceste on a Bicycle’). The two rehearse, lock horns, get involved with a woman and cycle. And the run-time flies by. At a deeper level, Alceste’s tirades against virtue signalling remain as relevant today as ever.

Maybe I was watching a different film from those who find merit in this blustering bore, played out with clichéd humans and cartoon monsters to orchestral superhero muzak. Admire the cgi… then doze. The humans do little but watch with mouths agape. Teenager Millie Bobby Brown is especially stuck in this mode, and even Rebecca Hall, here phoning in her performance, can find little else for her character to do. Occasionally someone even shouts “Go, go, go!” (always a bad sign). The dialogue is so pointless you could easily switch the sound off and miss nothing. But admire that cgi.

Of course, the film stands or falls on its monster battles, which are all in-yer-face cartoon pyrotechnics aimed at gamers, full of explosions and whizz-bangs. But admire that cgi.

Basically this is a kids’ version of a Godzilla film so perhaps it should not be judged too harshly as adult entertainment. If there is one thing to be said in its favour, it does make you long for an old Japanese Godzilla film with a man in a monster suit.

Flag-waving South Korean movie about an heroic battle against the communists during the Korean War. One hates to be churlish when it’s based on true events, but this is like a throwback to a 1950s film about a bunch of stereotypical untried squaddies becoming heroes. The fighting is filmed in shaky-cam and, to further alienate the audience, the acting is too hammy to relate to. Judged purely as a film, it’s a poor memorial to the real combatants.

Cop Denzel Washington is on the trail of a serial killer in LA. It’s got to be good, right? Wrong. Everything about this film is dull – the script, the direction, the soundtrack, even Denzel’s performance. His partner Remi Malek’s mannered performance doesn’t help, while even chief suspect Jared Leto succumbs to the general malaise. When the three of them exchange meaningful looks it’s more laughable than tense. Perhaps all concerned should have had a good sleep and started all over again.

Tense thriller about a young Jewish man who, to avoid execution by the Nazis, pretends to be Persian in order to teach the camp commandant the language. The problem is: he knows no Persian. Inspired by a true story, it’s an intriguing concept. Many concentration camp films are well-intentioned but clichéd. This is something different that grabs from Scene 1. No set-up scenes, back stories or screeds of stagey dialogue. This is fast-paced and exciting.

Unlike in many films set during WW2, the Nazis here are real people with problems of their own. The commandant himself, cruel but complex, is a wonderful creation that ranks alongside Ralph Fiennes’ SS Officer in Schindler’s List.

Our hero has to invent the language as he goes along. To begin with, the commandant wants only four words a day, but that soon adds up to become a lot to remember. It makes you wonder if you could do it yourself. Then one day the commandant asks for 400 words…

Would-be humorous thriller about a shooting involving four idiots who fall out over a pools win. It tries so hard to be quirky and unrealistic that it destroys any interest in the plot or the characters, so ironically it ends up just being dull. With TV aesthetics and a plot that darts back and forth in time to explain the shooting in retrospect, it’s hard to care about any of the goings-on. The ad campaign makes a lot of it being based on a Jo Nesbo thriller, as was the excellent film Headhunters, but this is a dud.

This is a true story about a Polish colonel spying for the CIA during the Soviet era. Billed as a ‘gripping thriller’ (aren’t they all?), it’s more of an old-fashioned, stagey, actorly drama. It’s a story worth telling but over 2hrs the film rarely produces any dramatic highs.

NB Ignore the crass ‘review’ by the lowbrow who has no time for foreign-language cinema. If you're dumb enough to restrict your viewing to English-language or dubbed films, you're missing out on most of the best films ever made.

Korean thriller about the search for a serial killer who surgically cuts up and mixes the bodies. With an exciting concept, intriguing plot developments and a strong climax it’s worthy of a Hollywood remake, but this lacklustre version is just disappointing. It’s let down by a slow pace, lack of action, impassive male and female leads and some poor directorial choices.

Although billed as a thriller, this is a slow-paced drama about an investigation into a border incident between North and South Korea. It’s theme is the futility of war, but the main impression you’ll be left with is the futility of making such a soporific drama. Filmed with a mostly static camera, and with no score to highlight any of the stagey scenes, it’s hard to maintain interest.